Local artist converts trash to treasures
Honey Boy's quirky hobby becomes business venture
Local artist known as Honey Boy creates off-beat art by recycling anything found in trash cans to framing pictures of dead people.
Thursday, April 26th, 2007
The neighbors are already asleep as Honey Boy bends over and unlatches the old wooden door to the cellar on the back of his house. He plods down the cement staircase and fumbles for the light switch in the cold, musty basement—his studio.
As the room becomes illuminated with light, Honey Boy pulls three clear plastic bags off a splintery wooden shelf, one filled with a colorful assortment of beads, another with various fake jewelry and the last one with aquarium rocks.
His gaze shifts to a metal lamp with a plain white shade as he sits on a stool in front of his workbench. He plants a cigarette between his lips and plucks a bead out of one of the bags. He will convert trashy trinkets and hot glue into art until he goes to bed.
Honey Boy (his artistic pseudonym) is Randy Walker, a Lawrence artist who takes nothing and turns it into something.
Walker has spent his life in trash dumps and salvage shops, collecting garbage and calling it art, which he sells along with strange collectables from booth number 150 in the basement of the Lawrence Antique Mall, 830 Massachusetts St.
His collectables, some of them politically incorrect, have been met with distaste or downright disgust. Walker said he understands why, but insists those objects have their place.
“Some peoples’ definition of art is if you can sell it,” he said. “As long as it suits some expression that you have or some feeling and you get something out of it, that’s all that matters isn’t it?”
Booth number 150 is a mixture of the bizarre featuring retro clothing, artwork from the paint-by-numbers school, an array of pink porcelain statuettes of naked women and antique pictures of corpses in coffins.
In the middle of the booth stands a waist-high dresser with three drawers that Honey Boy crafted. Images from both teen idol and professional wrestling magazines coat every inch of the wooden surface of the dresser.
Glued on top of the pictures is a random assortment of beads, shells, fake flowers, toys, body parts from broken Barbie dolls, a toy frog and countless other trinkets. A note attached to the dresser said it took 400 hours to complete and has an asking price of $400.
Walker, 49, isn’t your stereotypical artist. He’s tall, wears glasses, comfortable sweaters, khaki pants and flat sneakers, chain smokes Pall Mall lights and has lived with a yellow-headed cockatoo named Rauol for 25 years.
The time and place was different than today. That’s the reason you collect stuff.
- Randy Walker, Lawrence artist
He’s currently the house chef for the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, 1301 West Campus Rd. When he’s not cooking, he frequents auctions, resurrecting what he called, “odds and ends of peoples’ existences.” His home at 1012 New York is a kind of museum that pays homage to such existences.
He lived in Europe briefly as a child, where he said his parents made him aware of the architecture and art there before the family moved to Overland Park when he was 13. His father was a Lutheran minister and his mother sold insurance, but she also collected dishes and bells.
Walker started his own collections of unwanted treasures in high school after sifting through flea markets and visiting his grandparents in Iowa, who would take him to their local garbage dump.
Walker worked in thrift stores when he could and restaurants when he had to pay the bills.
Walker’s collections began with bread-bag mats he started hoarding because, the bags, made of tightly woven bread bags, resembled similar crafts his grandmother had created, and because of their durability. “I’ve had them for 20 years; you can’t kill them,” he said.
He has collections of dolls made from bottle caps, metallic flowers made from antique antifreeze cans, and a piece of elephant dung one Kansas City artist molded and painted in the likeness of Adolf Hitler, titling the piece, “Adolf Shitzler.”
“That’s definitely something out of nothing,” Walker said.
He has cow hairballs, ashtrays and lamps made out of hooves and animal legs, and the hind sections of dogs mounted on plaques that have antlers attached to their fur and pseudo mouths strategically positioned over their anuses. He said the latter, bought in Montana, repulsed him and he bought them to show people how stupid they were.
He said he started collecting pictures of dead people because there was a market for them. The antique pictures originated when cameras were new and travel was difficult. When people would die, and relatives couldn’t travel to their funerals in time, they took pictures of the deceased to show the family, Walker explained.
“The time and place was different than today,” he said. “That’s the reason you collect stuff.”
Going to estate sales disturbed him when he could tell someone was disposing of a dead relative’s precious belongings. “I know what happens when you die, meaning mostly what happens is if the kids don’t want your stuff, it goes out to nowhere,” said Walker, who finds those possessions sacred.
He has a dozen different labels for the things he collects. Some are folk art, some found art, some kitsch and others functional art like the bread-bag mats. Some are just arts and crafts. Walker said some are good and some bad, but that it’s all subjective.
Larry Billings, who has owned the Lawrence Antique Mall for 15 years, said Walker’s collections are sometimes met with surprise.
“I very seldom get any comments on him, but there have been a few,” he said.
The bread and butter of Walker’s diverse collections are his sock monkeys. Walker has transformed his home into a sock monkey museum, and guests often drop by to view his collection.
On a couch in a room lit with only a single light bulb are more than 200 monkeys—musty smelling old socks that were stitched together by rural mothers and grandmothers, and painted with stupid smiles to match big buttoned eyes.
Seeing the orgy of cloth and beast on Walker’s couch was enough for Lawrence author Pam Grout to include Walker in her book, “Kansas Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities and Other Offbeat Stuff,” which features more than 200 different Kansas artists.
“He collects quirky people and of course, so do I,” Grout said. “I felt like he was a kindred spirit.”
Despite his unique passions, Walker gets along well with members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, where he cooks, according to house president David Albers, Dallas junior. He said Walker is “one of those guys who you can talk to about anything.”
He said sometimes Walker will spend time with the house residents on the weekends and he even traveled with them recently to The Woodlands, a dog racing track in Kansas City, to teach them betting basics.
“Nobody’s creeped out by him,” Albers said about Walker’s unusual art and antiques.
Walker’s collections started out as a hobby, until he realized he could buy old items cheap and sell them at much higher prices. That’s Walker, the businessman. Honey Boy is the artist.
He has sold about 150 pieces of his own folk art signed by Honey Boy and other pseudonyms over two decades.
He has crafted picture frames and jewelry boxes decorated with random trash, many lamps including one covered with Rice Krispies Cereal stickers, and a suitcase caked with bar codes.
He fashions his art using a glue gun and random objects he pulls out of dumpsters or buys at auctions.
Walker said he started putting pictures of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and professional wrestlers in his trashy picture frames to add more lunacy to the work.
He sold one once for $25, later saw the same piece priced higher at an antique store in St. Joseph, Mo., and then later on a trip to Omaha saw the same picture being sold by an antique dealer for $125.
“Everybody made money on the deal except the last guy,” Walker smiled. “He’s probably still got it.”
Walker admits he stole some ideas for his work from the Dickeyville Grotto in Dickeyville, Wis., which sits on the Holy Ghost Parish grounds. The grotto is a sprawling religious shrine completed by Father Mathias Wernerus in 1930, according to its Web site.
Rev. Francis J. Steffen, pastor of the church, said in a phone interview that he didn’t see any problem with Walker or anyone touring the grounds and stealing ideas from the shrine for their own work. The stone is covered with anything imaginable, from broken glass to trinkets.
“I know way back, people would see how it was put together and do the same thing in their backyards,” Steffen said. “If it promotes folk art in other places, that’s fine.”
While Honey Boy progresses with his art, Walker is pursuing his latest fetish for freak memorabilia, such as trading cards similar to baseball cards that were once sold by sideshow performers for extra money.
“I understand the degrading factors and all that but they made money from it,” he said.
Most of his antique freak cards are autographed by the performers themselves, including his favorite of Robert Wadlow, who at 8 feet, 11 inches was touted as the tallest man who ever lived.
“There are a lot of people chasing after his ass,” Walker said about the card.
Randy Walker, who collects odds and ends of peoples’ existence, is one of them, while his alter-ego Honey Boy continues to toil away late into the night creating new treasures from old trash.
Kansan staff writer Tyler Harbert can be contacted at tharbert@kansan.com.
—Edited by Lisa Tilson
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